There was a post up some time last week I wanted to read called Women and Effective Altruism. Later last week I noticed the page seemed down and now I just get "Sorry, you don't have access to this page." I was wondering why that was. My 60 second glance at the two top comments gave me the impression that the post stimulated healthy discourse among EA women on their experiences in EA.
The author asked to take it down from the forum based on the comments received, you can see it on her website here.
I took it down due to the responses from the forum. The original intention of the post was to catalyze action from the within the community, but after it was around for a day or two, I realized this will not happen. The original goal of posting here will not be served.
In addition, the post being live here brought me a lot of headache. I felt like the responses from the forum were mob-like and fell into three categories 1. normalizing ( this is just a statistic, every community has a few) 2. dismissive (not a big deal) 3. attacking. I also have a full time job so didn't have the time to respond and felt increasingly unsafe given that I wasn't posting as an anon.
There will be some follow up work on this topic in upcoming days.
I saw all of the comments in the state before commenter removed her post.
There was a lot of women who responded in depth and consideration to the post. Altogether, this produced a pretty convincing response that did not make post look as favorable as I think the commenter wanted it.
I don't at all like EA rhetoric, which is highly defective, but the women there probably spent 100-woman hours of time writing all of their comments. By removing the post, the commenter silenced their views without answering or developing a response.
Let me explain my thought process.
I didn't know I could delete individual comments but even if I could, I wouldn't feel good censoring individual comments. Am I mad she called me bigoted? Of course. Should she be allowed to make her speech about me being bigoted? Yes. As someone who is strongly criticizing EA so publicly, I for one want free and unrestricted speech. From a system perspective, multiple players playing most optimally helps us get at the best solutions. Optimality though doesn't mean playing nasty/below the belt, and I'd definitely opine that calling me bigoted was a nasty move on her part.
About deleting the post: EA is not entitled to my words, my thoughts or my time. I am not getting paid to do this, it is all free and voluntary and comes at the cost of alternative uses of my time. There were multiple people who expressed similar sentiments as Monica though her characterization was the most extremely worded. If EA as a group speak abusively to me, or otherwise indicate my opinions are unvalued, I'm just gonna take my post and exit the door. I think that's fair to decide to not invest your energy where it is not appreciated.
Thirdly and most importantly, E... (read more)
Thanks for explaining your thought process. I agree with the first half. But I'll respectfully push back on the rest. Please bear with me as this may be hard to hear. But I also hope it is roundabout nice to hear, and hope it clears the air.
1. Was your energy not appreciated?
Yes it's fair to leave spaces where you aren't appreciated. But many people in that thread did take the concerns seriously and give you a warm reception. Catherine and Julia both offered to speak to you. As did Rocky. The comments were also full of people saying things like "I don't want to negate your experiences" or "I'm glad this post was written". From what I remember, kind and concerned comments were finding their way to the top, and your post was even netting more upvotes by day too.
Additionally, I say this as someone who was hesitant about your post myself (I asked for further details on the original post), any hesitance about the piece or even down-votes didn't mean that I or others didn't want to take your concerns seriously, nor that we didn't already have our own concerns about women in EA. We just needed a little help to make sense of the whole post, and possibly didn't agree with the re... (read more)
Because they all did in the comments of your orginal post. I remember that being the case because I had specifically checked at the time for community health team's response (Julia and Catherine), and also I remember being impressed with EA NYC response (and I thought of that as Rocky although they also have another person for community health and diversity).
Before writing my long comment above, I did quickly check the Greater Wrong mirror post for their comments cuz I'd hate to mention ther names and be wrong. But I'm happy to publicly commend people for trying to communicate, as long as it can be gleaned from publicly visible information.
If they also DMed you, I didn't know that. The offers to speak in comments are all I'm referencing.
It is eery to me that you aren't including a category that is:
"Good faith discourse from other women sharing their valid and different experiences in EA"
Was it this post by chance? https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AbohvyvtF6P7cXBgy/brainstorming-ways-to-make-ea-safer-and-more-inclusive This one seems to be on a very similar topic. But it has a different name so it's probably not the same one but possibly Richard revised the title at some point.
No, "Women and Effective Altruism" by Keerthana preceded "Brainstorming ways to make EA safer and more inclusive" by Richard.
I think it is largely due to the fact that a woman tried to share her personal experience and a lot of people with a very vague understanding of the sorts of pressures females face from men decided to comment in not the very kind way. Calling someone who is talking about her very unpleasant experience a 'bigot' and seeing only comments about polyamory in a situation where women are made feel uncomfortable is plane sad to be diplomatic.
There were a lot of comments from a lot of women and men about a wide variety of topics brought up in the post. I strongly disagree that there were "only comments about polyamory" from "a lot of people with a very vague understanding of the sorts of pressures females face from men".
The comment on question referred to the post as "bigoted", not the author as a "bigot"
A key difference is that there is strong evidence that Émile P. Torres is an intellectually dishonest critic. By contrast, when a typical EA Forum user draws a distinction between e.g. "bigoted" and "bigot", there is no reason to suppose they are exploiting the difference to make toxic insinuations about other people.
(Posted under an anonymous account because I don't want Torres to harass me, as he has done previously when I posted under my real name.)
I looked back at the specific instances I remembered of this, and they weren’t quite how I remembered. There were more instances that I don’t remember specific enough information about to find again, which makes linking to a source for my impression hard, but given how I misremembered the instances I could check up on specifically, I’m more generally suspicious of how well grounded my impression actually was. I still think a tendency of this sort exists to some extent, but I’m tentatively unendorsing my original comment.
So just FYI:
I've had members in my community point out concern that the post being taken down is evidence of censorship in EA.
The message "Sorry, you don't have access to this page" should probably read something like "Sorry, this post has been removed by the author." This is not even "only about optics". This is just updating a message so that it says something true rather than false.
Thanks for flagging! Added a feature request in the feature request thread
Just to clarify, I don't work on the forum, I only help out with moderation, so I'm only speculating here.
If you want to contact the people that run the forum, you can use these channels (but keep in mind they're currently probably a bit overloaded)
The forum codebase seems to be public, you can see that the text was changed in November https://github.com/ForumMagnum/ForumMagnum/pull/6143 https://github.com/ForumMagnum/ForumMagnum/pull/6153/files#diff-5dc494c8af9a70df8c13a716cab8cd560735eb4e5638e21d2735f87a39f96ad8: approximately one day after I posted the feature request.
Maybe the person in your community had concerns even with the new text? Or maybe they were not logged in? I think having a detailed report/request for change could help the developers (e.g. including a screenshot of what you saw, and a mention of what you would have preferred to see).
As for:
As a software developer (not working on the forum), I have to admit I sighed a bit while reading this.
These kinds of things are sadly often more tricky than they seem (as you just found out, the solution didn't... (read more)
Hi I'm really sorry. I wrote that late last night very tired and frustrated after thinking about this or gender EA stuff all day. I thought about deleting or retracting my comment a few minutes after I wrote it, but I just left it in what I hoped was decent form. But unfortunately it was so not decent form nor correct. So now I've retracted it.
It seems that when I revisited the link back in November, it was before the page was changed (probably before this post was made), so I didn't see the update in November. And when I and others visited 2 weeks ago I guess we all just missed that second sentence "This is usually due to the user deleting the post" because it isn't as obvious on mobile? I do struggle to see how we could have missed the sentence about it, so perhaps I'm the only one who missed it, and others saw it but still felt the language implied foul play.
As you suggest, I'll message the people in my community about how it looked to them. And if that does yield good feedback or I think of some better language I'll message mods.
And yeah, my latter sentences you quote where I speak about it not being treated immediately aren't valid. It does look like the issue was ... (read more)
This seems like generally a bad precedent to set - lots of people put a bunch of time into writing thoughtful comments; those comments are now gone. Even leaving the post up with the body blanked out would be preferable. I’m not sure the author of a post should have the power to erase all the discussion of it unless they have a very good reason.
I think it's a somewhat hard tradeoff to set in terms of visibility and streisand-effect like things. I am currently happy with the equilibrium where you can still find the comments on the greaterwrong mirror:
https://ea.greaterwrong.com/posts/NacFjEJGoFFWRqsc8/women-and-effective-altruism
My understanding is that the author ultimately decided to take it down when someone called them a bigot in the comments (for their points related to polyamory). I think both the comment and reaction to it were a bit much personally, but I can understand not wanting the comments visible if that was the key worry for the author.
To clarify, authors have always been able to make a post private by clicking "Move to Draft" on their posts.
Moderators can do so as well (like has been done in this case) if, for example, the author does not know about that possibility.
The author has a note at the top of the saying this was “a heavily downvoted post in [the EA] community” when it was posted here. The archive link Dawn provided, however, shows that it received 64 upvotes on net. Is there a reason for this significant discrepancy between her claim and what the archive link shows?
If you mouseover the score, you can see that there were more than 200 total votes. I assume it meant that it had lots of downvotes even if the final score was positive.
That seems like a misleading framing. When I hear heavily downvoted post, I think of something that’s well in the negatives on net. Otherwise, the post could also be described as “heavily upvoted” even though it only got 64 karma on net.
Interesting! I had missed that post. There’s a backup of the discussion on archive.org. If it was removed to sort of close the discussion, it’s probably okay to link it because that copy can’t be commented on? But I’ll remove my comment if someone feels that it’s uncooperative to link the copy.